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Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

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Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#171

Post by tzs »

arjie wrote: post #90

The article makes the case that iRobot mismanaged their business at the behest of investors. Suppose one grants that this mismanagement occurred[0]. Then years into the mismanagement, Amazon offers to buy them. At this point, whatever path the company has been doomed to by mismanagement has already been taken. In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad business decisions have been made. So the F…

> As for the other thing about neither the FTC nor the EU actually bringing any proceedings against Amazon or iRobot and simply requesting information: this seems either naïve or a misrepresentation of how governments act to end deals. It's not that convincing to me that organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up the big companies are "just asking for information".

The ask for information on pretty much every big acquisition. How else do you expect them to decide if they should try to stop it or not?

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#172

Post by tzs »

echelon wrote: post #36
ghaff wrote: post #22

Roombas just weren't that useful for most house layouts and situations (cords/toys/clutter/etc.) I seriously considered getting one and decided it just wouldn't be a win.

Roombas have always been terrible. I bought a top-of-line Dreame, Roborock, and Eufy recently for our place - we have lots of pets. The Dreame is easily 10,000x better than Roomba ever was. It never makes mistakes. I'd advocate for Dreame for anyone in the market for a robot vacuum. The app is annoying, but everything else about it is sublime. Eufy would be better if they'd fix their roller brush design and didn't le…

Yeah, what is the deal with roller brush design? I don't have pets but do have long hair and apparently it is not as firmly attached to my head as I'd like it to be.

With the Eufy I had the brush needed to be cleared of hair fairly often, and that clearing took a bit of work. Often I had to use a utility knife to cut the hair out.

My Roomba, on the other hand, almost never gets hair caught in the brushes, and if it does it easily pulls right off by hand.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#173

Post by tzs »

xnx wrote: post #34
BeetleB wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal." How did they shut it down?

"On Monday, the FTC requested more information from both companies about the $1.7 billion deal, according to an investor filing from iRobot, in what’s known as a “second request” and an indicator of deeper scrutiny by antitrust officials." https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/20/tech/roomba-amazon-ftc-invest...

So, that is common and doesn't mean they are going to shut down a deal. E.g., also in 2022 they made a "second request" for the Broadcom acquisition of VMWare and that one went through.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#174

Post by tzs »

hodder wrote: post #49

This is such a bad faith, and frankly dishonest take on the situation. As you know, Khan’s FTC worried it wouldn’t be able to prevent Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot in court, so instead it dragged out approval, which it never granted, while continuously threatening to block. Simultaneously, her FTC openly worked with the EU to convince the EU to use its more expansive antitrust regime to get the EU to block the deal.…

> The fact iRobot later failed and was sold to Chinese competitors is directly attributable to that block, as it would otherwise be owned and supported by Amazon right now

...or "owned and neglected by Amazon right now". I'm not confident Amazon can maintain their IoT stuff adequately. Take their Alexa stuff. They have been having large problems with the Alexa mobile apps for months now.

For example the device list often shows up as either empty or the devices say an error occurred if you try to use them. Sometimes repeatedly trying will finally succeed and then they all work at least until next time you use the app.

The back end knows about the devices, and you can operate them all by voice just fine, through the app or an Echo device, so it looks like they just screwed up something in the app.

When I first hit this it wasn't working for so long that I assumed it must be a problem just affecting me because if it was widespread surely they would have fixed it. Eventually I described it to an LLM and it gave me links to a whole bunch of discussion on Reddit and other forums of people having the same problem, spanning something like the last year.

The Chinese company buying them is a robot vacuum company, and was already a manufacturer and supplier for iRobot. As it currently stands I'm more confident that they can keep my Roomba working than Amazon can.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#175

Post by faidit »

bogwog wrote: post #80
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thing is, if you slash research And if you dump your defence contracts you may have trouble paying for research.

I'd be interested in learning about how the US military uses Roombas (assuming it's not classified)

Sucking taxpayer money into a black hole, of course.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#176

Post by zaptheimpaler »

renewiltord wrote: post #109
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know the FTC blocked the deal. What is this quote supposed to be showing us?

The 'we' is doing a lot of work there. 'You' might know, but many do not and explicitly have different views. An example thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330028

Oops, I just assumed everyone knows who Lina Khan is and would infer the rest because I'm such a big fanboy!

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#177

Post by overfeed »

gizmondo wrote: post #112
lkramer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, there is a defence invoking that exact sentiment if a merger is about to be blocked, bu iRobot decided not to invoke it (likely because it would have caused the price to be lower).

Why the price would be lower? Presumably the price was already agreed upon. Having a provision in the contract that the price is reduced if this argument is made to the antitrust authorities makes no sense. I now realized that I recently saw some old tweets from this guy where he first opposed this merger and then celebrated the cancellation of the deal. So it seems he's just grasping at straws to look less like an i…

> Why the price would be lower?

Renegotiate the deal by threatening to walk away - or actually walking away[1] and buying the pieces from the bankruptcy sale.

1. Which Musk tried and failed to do when Twitter sued for specific performance. I suspect a company that's going out of business is far less fiesty.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#178

Post by orwin »

bluGill wrote: post #160
OvidNaso wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then back to the original aricles implied take about the incompetence of these wall street investors. What kind of billion dollar deal doesn't have info on the deal?

i don't know what information is ask for, or what format is needed but I would assume it all needs to be rewritten - likely censoring information not asked for they want to not share.

Last time France allowed a huge merger/acquisition without asking to read the books, it was Alstom/GE, and GE books were so cooked it isn't even funny. Lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of the tech edge got lost, and now China is close to be a market leader.

So personally I think that finance guys should move their head from their asses and allow for inquiries, because their lies and deceit are damaging the society they live in. Maybe we should hold board members and C-suite all responsible when books are cooked, and maybe, when they're proven trustworthy, the red tape might decrease.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#179

Post by satellite2 »

crazygringo wrote: post #117
charcircuit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The innovation being shutdown wasn't innovation towards making robot vacuum cleaners better. It was innovation direct towards military applications like building robotic hands.

Exactly this. If they had been innovating in vacuum technology then maybe this article would have a point. But they were building stuff for the military and for space, and there's a good reason investors wanted them to get out of that because it was sucking up money and not resulting in better vacuum cleaners.

Well it's 2025, we've just spent the better half of the year discussing the bitter lesson. It seems clear solving more general problem is key to innovation.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#180

Post by justinclift »

viscanti wrote: post #45
Grosvenor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is probably true. But Roomba sucked in the early 2000's too. They never got better.

I believe the author's thesis is that if they had invested in innovation over a couple decades, the product probably would have sucked less.

Or perhaps would have sucked more where it needed to, and sucked less where it didn't.
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